The Readability of «Ulysses»

On the Ulysses centenary the Irish Embassy in Bucharest gathered admirers of Joyce’s masterpiece to address its proverbial difficulty with veterans’ clues for virgin readers. Film, philosophy, translation and musical theory, rhetoric, close and hermeneutic reading are invoked. Integrated in its right Irish context by Joyce’s ambassadorial fellow-Dubliner, Ulysses shines in Enrico Terrinoni’s paean to the inter-translatability of masterpieces, by Shakespeare, Blake, Beckett, Borges, and Joyce, touching the enigmatic substance of Ulysses and of life. The “Teaching Ulysses” section appeals to students’ youthful experience and intuition, admitting them step by step to the feast. The “New Readability Arguments” explore loud text reading, with heard words getting the better of written vocables, notice the baroque repetitive dynamics of skilful, scrupulous intratextual word sequences that already give the book in shorthand to readers, or expand on the metafictional potential of character dubbings.